They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people -- ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists. The home's owner, Patrick Mahaffy, thought they were only a century or two old before contacting researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder."

This afternoon at 4:30 I'll be signing copies of Murder in Four Parts at Murder by the Book in Houston. Drop by if you're in town and have a few minutes to spare. And if you're not in town but would like a signed copy, MBTB does mail order.

13 Unsolved scientific puzzles - Times Online: "Author Michael Books has investigated some of the most puzzling anomalies of modern science, those intractrable problems that refuse to conform to the theories. Here he counts down the 13 strangest."

About 20 years ago, I read Resnick's Stalking the Unicorn. He's just now gotten around to doing a sequel. In the first book, John Justin Mallory, a low-rent p. i., gets a case that takes him to an alternate Manhattan. It's New Year's Eve, and he has 24 hours to find a unicorn. In the new book, it's only two years later (time must pass more slowly there), and it's Halloween. This time, Mallory has one night to find a vampire who's killed the nephew of his partner, Winnifred Carruthers. He's accompanied by a vampire named Bats McGuire and a dragon named Nathan. Nathan prefers to be called Scaly Jim Chandler, the name he uses on the private-eye novels he writes.

The chase is complicated by the fact that on this particular evening, all the supernatural inhabitants of the island are out and partying. Zombies, vampires, goblins, you name it. Corpses abound. Lots of weirdness is going on, so much that the case itself doesn't really seem to matter as Resnick engages in lots of riffs, rants, and comic patter. A Robert B. Parker novel doesn't have nearly as much repartee as this one does. So be prepared. You'll either laugh a lot and have a good time (as I certainly did), or not. If you're in the mood for weirdness and laughs, this would be a good one to pick up. Pyr has just reprinted Stalking the Unicorn if you want to check that one out first.

Friday, February 27, 2009

It’s just madness. First email. Then instant message. Then MySpace. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. It’s not enough anymore to “Just do it.” Now we have to tell everyone we are doing it, when we are doing it, where we are doing it and why we are doing it."

Gore Verbinski to Direct Clue - ComingSoon.net: "Universal Pictures has attached Gore Verbinski ('Pirates of the Caribbean' franchise) to develop Clue, a live-action murder mystery based on the Hasbro board game that he would direct, reports Variety.

Verbinski will produce through his Universal-based Blind Wink company, along with Hasbro's Brian Goldner and Bennett Schneir, who also have an overall deal at the studio."

Ancient Shipwreck's Stone Cargo Linked to Apollo TempleThe Temple of Apollo at Claros, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from Kızılburun, was at the top of her list during the July 2007 election holiday. She drove up to the deserted site and knew she was on to something when she looked at the fallen-down marble columns scattered on the marshy land. "I was struck pretty much right away," she recalls. The columns were Doric, the same as the marble on the ship, and looked like the right size. She waded around in the spring water that floods the site, checking chunks of columns with a tape measure. "I thought, wow, this is definitely a candidate."

Neal Barrett wrote some of the funniest, wildest, and most idiosyncratic crime novels of the '90s, of which Pink Vodka Blues was the first. It's a hilarious take on a classic situation. Russell Murray is the editor of a literary magazine in Chicago. He drinks way too much. And he's in big trouble when he wakes up in a hotel room with a beautiful woman just before two men come into the room and kill her. They try to kill Murray, too, but he gets away. Things never slow down after that.

Wanted for murder, Murray winds up in a detox center in Wisconsin. He escapes along with a beautiful redhead named Sherry Lou Wynn. One of his many problems is that he has no memory of where he's been or what he's done. He and Sherry Lou try to stay alive while being pursued around the country by homicidal goons, including the murderous Wacker twins and a blue-haired, tennis-shoe wearing granny with an Uzi. Bones Pinelli wants his briefcase back, by golly, and he doesn't care who dies as long as he gets it.

You've probably guessed that there's a surprise in the briefcase, but I'm not telling. If you've never read this book, you're in for a real treat. And while you're at it, you should check out Dead Dog Blues, Skinny Annie Blues, and Bad Eye Blues. They're all standalones, not series books, and they're guaranteed to be unlike anything else you've read. What are you waiting for?

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Is Aging an Accident of Evolution? -A Galaxy Insight: "Prevailing theory of aging challenged by Stanford University Medical School researchers. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage similar to rust. The Stanford findings suggest specific genetic instructions drive the process. If they are right, science might one day find ways of switching the signals off and halting or even reversing aging.

“We were really surprised,” said Stuart Kim, who is the senior author of the research."

For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

'When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them,' says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting."

In case you were wondering, and I'm sure you were, the frog that showed up in our hanging basket last June is still there. He's survived Hurricane Ike, two falls (the wire holding the basket broke twice), and a cold winter, but there he is in spite of the fact I have no idea what he can be eating. I guess he likes it in there.

In a stunning Midtown makeover, Mayor Bloomberg is expected to announce today that traffic lanes along Broadway from 42nd to 47th streets and from 32nd to 35th streets will be torn up starting Memorial Day and transformed into pedestrian plazas, an experiment that will last through the end of the year.

To accommodate downtown traffic through Times Square, Seventh Avenue will be widened from three to four lanes at 45th Street, said one source briefed on the plan last night."

Warner Bros. and a pair of top-tier production banners are in the early stages of a reboot of the 1980s children's fantasy classic.

The Kennedy/Marshall Co. ('The Curious Case of Benjamin Button') and Leonard DiCaprio's shingle Appian Way are in discussions with Warners about reviving the 25-year-old franchise with a modern spin. The studio recently acquired rights to the property, clearing the way for a potential remake."

Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years.Internal fertilisation was widespread among prehistoric fish living on ancient tropical coral reefs in the Devonian period, research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed."

I just received this news from Todd Mason. Farmer was a giant in the SF field, one of my favorites for more than 50 years. Here's what Todd had to say:

Philip Jose Farmer, a writer who was shaking up fantastic fiction right out of the gate with his novella “The Lovers” (STARTLING STORIES, 1952, and the single biggest marker that STARTLING was ready to challenge all the other sf magazines as a source of first-rate fiction, and briefly led to STARTLING apparently being the best-selling magazine in the sf field), has died at age 91, family members report.

“The Lovers” was a borderline horror sf story, involving the affair between a human man and a humanoid alien woman, where things, it can be said, don’t quite work out the way he expected. A lot closer to William Burroughs than Edgar Rice, a comparison that Farmer would explore in later work (such as his WB’s version of Tarzan story, “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod.”). Farmer would go on to write further major work dealing with sexual themes, playful notions of the interface between fiction and reality (notably TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO), and some relatively straightforward, if sometimes pornographic, horror fiction. He also wrote fiction as if by the characters in Kurt Vonnegut’s books, “Kilgore Trout”’s VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL and more, mostly for THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in the 1970s.

A restless innovator, by no means always achieving what he set out to do, but I think he mostly had fun doing it. He’d been suffering from a long illness.

Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice: "OSLO (Reuters) – Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica's ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said on Tuesday.

Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

'The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys,' said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research."

Rafe McGregor maintains an excellent blog, well worth your time. He's also the author of a fine new novel, The Architect of Murder, published by Robert Hale.

The story involves a number of real and fictional characters, including Cecil John Rhodes, whose last will and testament kick off the events of the book. One of the witnesses to Rhodes's will, Eric Lowenstein, is murdered. Scotland Yard's Superintendent Melville, head of the Special Branch, recruits Major Alec Marshall VC, just back from the fighting in South Africa to help investigate. As it happens, Marshall's sister has also recently died under mysterious circumstances. If you're a mystery reader, you already know that the two events will turn out to be connected.

The setting is London, 1902, and it's evoked quite well. If you know a little bit about the history of the time and the events in South Africa, you'll probably enjoy the book even more. There's some dandy police procedure (McGregor is a Sherlockian), and plenty of interesting characters to carry the story along. Not to mention action. Even a swordfight! I got a kick out of some of the things I thought of as little in-jokes (Melville is referred to once or twice as "Mr. M." and there's also a "Mr. Q.") The plot has plenty of twists, and I suspect that hardly anyone will figure out all of them. I know I didn't.

The Architect of Murder looks like a hit to me. The ending plainly sets the stage for a sequel, and I think we'll see one for sure.

Gordon Van Gelder posted this on the fictionmags list, and I thought it was a nice tribute. The Virginia legislature has declared June 27, 2009, Will F. Jenkins Day. Jenkins (aka Murray Leinster) was a huge presence in the SF digests and anthologies I read in the 1950s, and I've enjoyed his work ever since.

State biologists are studying the temporary use of magnets to disrupt the internal navigation of federally and state-protected American crocodiles, which have been spotted most often in neighborhoods of Miami-Dade and Monroe counties."

Comedian Rob Corddry is co-starring in the movie, which is to be directed by Steve Pink in Vancouver, British Columbia, starting in April.

The movie is about a group of longtime friends who miss the good old days and end up being transported back to 1987 by a hot tub that turns out to be a time machine, the entertainment industry trade newspaper said."

The Facts: "FREEPORT — A sign bolted to pilings near a boat ramp off the Brazos River warning passing boaters about eating what they catch is new, but the advisory itself has been in place for a dozen years, officials say.

The delay in putting up the signs is because money never was allocated for them, said Kirk Wiles, manager of the seafood and aquatic life group for the Texas Department of State Health Services, which issued the warning."

Asia Pacific Arts: APA Top Ten: Female martial artists in Asian film: "Compared with Hollywood, Asian cinema has seen far more bona-fide female action stars that can inspire empowerment as much as awe. And though Prachya Pinkaew's recent film Chocolate is only young star Jeeja Yanin's first big-screen role, we're ready to enshrine her in that legacy. There's no better validation for her performance in Chocolate than to say that she's worthy of comparison to some of Asian cinema's finest."

It is difficult to find anyone these days who is not familiar with Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical world of orcs, hobbits and dwarves. A whole generation of film-goers is familiar with such place names like 'Dead Marshes' and 'Mount Doom.'

But this peculiar nomenclature isn't unique to Middle Earth. In fact, such names are everywhere. In France, for example, youl'll find the City of Boatmen. The Caucasus plays host to the Land of the Fire Keepers. And who hasn't dreamed of vacationing in the Land of Calves? But to get to these places, you'll need a new map, which should be hitting bookstores in the Great Land of the Tattooed -- Great Britain -- by the end of the month."

Showing the Renaissance master in a three-quarter profile and wearing a hat, the slightly damaged oil painting on wood was discovered by a medieval historian in the private collection of an aristocratic family from Acerenza, a hill town near Potenza in Basilicata."

After a few minutes, Joan, who was 25 years older than me, came out of the house with nothing on, dived gracefully off the board, swam the length of the pool underwater and came up right between my legs.

'Hi there!' she said in her most vivacious voice. It was a lovely, creative invitation and I responded accordingly."

The Razzies: Mike Myers and Paris Hilton 'win' big | TV, movie and music news | Film | EW.com: "On the eve of the Oscars, the decidedly less coveted Golden Raspberry Awards were handed out Saturday night to some of the least acclaimed films of the year. Mike Myers' The Love Guru was the night's big winner, taking home Worst Picture, Worst Actor (for Myers himself), and Worst Screenplay. Paris Hilton also earned Razzies in several categories, including Worst Actress (for The Hottie & The Nottie), Worst Supporting Actress (for Repo! The Genetic Opera), and Worst Couple (with either Christine Lakin or Joel David Moore in The Hottie & The Nottie)."

Texas Has Had Its Day in the Political Sun - washingtonpost.com: "But now, barely a month into the Obama administration, even the proudest Texans must admit: The days of Lone Star Power are over. You may greet this news with tears or with relief, but there's no denying it. Now that George W. Bush has hightailed it back to Dallas, there is no Texan of any real significance left on the national stage. Kay Bailey Hutchison is still hanging on, and Texas has that governor, Rick whatsisname, the guy with the haircut, but the most visible Texan in Washington right now is probably the Libertarian Ron Paul. I don't think I need to say much more than that."

A plant watchman and 'jack-of-all-trades' at A-Z Industries Inc., of Northbrook, Ill., Fabian commutes to the job in his Buick LeSabre every day from his home in Niles, Ill., despite getting ready to celebrate his 100th birthday next month, The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday.

A bachelor, Fabian says he 'just needs to keep busy' at his age and is mainly motivated because of his loyalty to A-Z Industries' owners, the Anixter family."